Algernon Cadwallader on Politics, Happy Gilmore 2, and Letting the Jams Run Free

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Algernon Cadwallader are one of the most ballyhooed emo bands of the last 25 years, and last week they returned with a very deservedly ballyhooed new record Trying Not to Have a Thought (imagine that—couldn't be me!). I had an extremely good time a few months ago talking to a few members of this legendary band—specifically, vocalist/bassist Peter Helmis and guitarist Joe Reinhart—about their reunion, putting this new record together, and much more. It was a very good convo that I'm excited for you to read, check it out:

Let's start by talking about how this new music came together. From what I've read about it already, the process sounded pretty organic.
Peter: "Organic" is the word for sure. We've always written our music very jam-based—we get together and pick uip our instruments, start making noise, and then we get lost in it. That's how we warm up and get in the zone, and it's actually how almost all of our songs have always been written—just jamming. Nowadays, we're smart enough to record everything. We go back and see the parts we really liked and cut stuff up later on, and then we get to work on it from there.

What was different this time around is that we're split up all over the country these days. So we took advantage of other times we were getting together preparing for tours and festivals during our whole reunion and budgeted in some time for getting together and jamming. Sooner than later, songs started rising out of that process. By the second or third session, we were like, "Oh, we can actually write some new stuff." We started collecting the songs, and before we knew it we had a whole album's worth of material.

What did you guys witness during the reunion tour in terms of energy from the audience and yourselves?
Joe: It was pretty breathtaking. We were hoping for the best, and we got whatever comes after that. We were all really taken back by the size of the rooms and the energy of the people in the rooms. If it was already a large room, it felt three times as big with our audience, because they were going nuts.

Peter: I was nervous for the very first show—we drove to Pittsburgh and started off in our home state, but we didn't want to start off with Philly quite yet. We wanted to work our way up to that. But with Pittsburgh, I remember having a little bit of the nerves —just like, "Oh, we gotta play every fucking song we ever wrote, and those are all 20 years old." But it went great, and once that was out of the way we were off to the races. The rooms and the energy really lifted us up and took us with it. It was fucking fun.

As somebody who follows trends in music really closely, it's always interesting to witness the act of myth-making in real time regarding bands. I'm curious to hear how it's felt from your guys' end regarding the initial run.
Peter: I mean, we started getting asked to play reunion shows the day after we broke up—and that didn't stop. We were used to it and shrugging it off a little bit. We were all doing other projects, we never stopped making music. But it was still flattering to see people stoked on Algernon and recognize that there was a younger group of kids who were like, "I can't believe I never got to see this." When LAUREN Records reissued our whole catalog in 2018, that's when I realized there's a whole bunch of people who didn't get to see us and are still into our music.

That didn't effectively trigger a reunion, but we knew the lore was there, and it was flattering. We were just working on our own projects until we decided to do the reunion mid-pandemic, and at that point we realized, "Who knows how much time any of us have left, so if we're at all interested in playing these songs again, we should do it before the the world ends."

Somebody who once mentioned to me online about how they're a big Algernon fan was Laura Les of 100 Gecs. When I find out that a group like that listened to you guys when they were younger, it makes a lot of sense to me. I'm curious to hear about any moments where you've been surprised to hear groups citing you guys as influences.
Joe: I've always liked being out with other bands, and at some point I noticed that, at least once a show, somebody would be like, "Yo, I'm in love with Algernon, you're the reason we all play music." I'd be like, "That's fucking beautiful." I was always very taken back by it. It started happening at some point, and it still continues to happen, and I'm not taking it for granted. It feels beautiful every time it does.

Peter: Someone within the last year or so—I can't remember the artist's name—released a hyper-sky record, and cited Algernon as one of their influences for their record, which I was kind of surprised to hear. For this record, Joe wrote a couple ska parts for it, and there's a couple hidden ska riffs on this record.

One thing that struck me almost immediately when listening to this record is how dense it sounds. But what you guys do also sounds very free-flowing. I don't get that labored-over feeling that I get from a lot of math rock or prog, which are two genres I also associate with dense sound. I'm really interested to hear about interplay in the band. To the listener, it can almost feel like a magic trick to hear songs emerge like this.
Peter: When it comes to the jamminess of it all, we do care about trying to record stuff as live as possible. I'm not gonna say it's 100% live, but we try to get as many full takes as we can and then fill in the rest. Everything emerges from a jam sensibility, so it's right there from the beginning—the live feel, all of us together, pushing and pulling. All of that is in the backbone of the music.

Even when we do dig further and get more intricate, it all has to fit in that live vibe. We have to be able to bring it back to the band and be able to play through it. We're huge fans of live music and live-sounding recordings. If we just gridded everything up, it wouldn't sound the same—not that it would be bad, it might sound a little bit more proggy that way. But it's all about the live feel. Even if there are some missed notes, we embrace that. That's part of the stuff that we love.

Joe: We always pick the vibe of the take over the perfectness of the take. But in a lot of instances, we're like, "Maybe we can do better, we'll redo it later." But we just keep telling ourselves, "Well, we want it to sound like a band in the room, and if I redo it, maybe it'll get 10% better—but it's pretty good the way it is, so let's just leave it there."

Peter: The generation we grew up in was the dawn of digital engineering. It opened up a lot of possibilities, but it also shut the door on the vibe and feel of music from most of the bands that influenced our band. We always have some sort of digital aspects in our recordings, and we try to have as much analog aspect in our recordings, too. It's about that cognitive decision of not trying to make things perfect, because the music that we love was not perfect.

Joe: "A band in a room," even down to the mixing stage, was really the end goal.

In terms of influence, do you guys feel like there are new things that have popped up for you in terms of what drives the songcraft? Conversely, do you feel like there's things that have fallen away?
Peter: What I notice is the small differences. Over the decades, we've learned that honing in on our song structure can push a song over the edge. But at the same time, "Whatever feels good, do it" has always been the Algernon model, even if it's a really weird decision.

Joe: From a structural standpoint, the more A-B-A-B-C song structures that this record has came easier. We weren't like, "What do we do here?"

Do you guys have any reunion records from bands that have gotten back together that you hold in high esteem? I think of the reunion-era Dinosaur Jr. run as an example of a band doing their best work after they got back together.
Peter: Yeah, Beyond is great. Superchunk's Majesty Shredding too. Beyond the reunion thing, I also like bands with long careers who just happen to take seven-to-ten years off. Both of those records feel like, "Did they ever break up, or did they
just stop playing for a while?" When you do it like that instead of as a reunion thing, it's more like, "Oh yeah, this band obviously has gotten older and has different influences now, and they're just evolving." If you like the music that those artists make, at the very least it's interesting to see where they're at now.

I also feel that way about this record we've made. Once I heard the songs that we were completing, our close friends were asking what it sounded like, and I was like, "It kind of sounds like Algernon if we hadn't stopped." Maybe there would've been some other records in between these ones over the past 14 years, and then we would've gotten to this point. It would sound exactly like this.

Talk to me about the concept of aging in terms of making music. How did getting older play a role in this new record?
Peter: I don't know if we're the best people to ask about aging, because apparently we're just doing the same thing we were doing in high school, with the same people.

Joe: It does sort of feel like the fountain of youth, to some degree. We get in the room together, we jam, we make fun of each other, and then we have sleepovers and watch movies. Not a ton has changed.

Peter: And we all know we're very lucky to say that. Logistically, we live across the country from each other. We got kids and pets—and jobs to some degree. It takes planning for us to get together, which is a bit of pain in the ass to schedule sometimes, and it takes a little bit more effort. But once we do get together, We're like, "We got a job to do."

Lyrically, on this record, I would've wrote the same things when I was younger. But there was a conscious effort when we started Algernon to keep the lyrics ambiguous and up to interpretation. Since that music was such a collective effort, I wanted the lyrics to feel that way—not too personal, not too directly from my point of view. With this record, I didn't totally know what I was going to write about when we were writing the songs. Lyrics and vocals always come later on for us. But when I sat down and started writing, this was the stuff that was coming out the easiest, because it's all balled up inside. Everybody else was on board, so I felt like I could speak for all of us, more or less.

"Attn MOVE" obviously stands out from a lyrical perspective. The MOVE bombing is one of those historical instances where you learn about it and you're like, "Holy shit, this fucking happened?" And it happened relatively recently, too! I'm really curious to hear you guys talk about the political aspect of expressing yourselves, because it's something you guys have engaged with before. You also covered "Mad World" for the Kinsella compilation for Palestine. In the 2000s and the 2010s, a lot of indie felt very apolitical to me, or at least uninterested in engaging with politics—whether it be because they thought it was too cringe or due to careerist aims. It does seem like that mentality has fallen by the wayside, though.
Peter: I agree with you. We grew up just outside of Philadelphia, and going to punk shows in the late '90s and early 2000s, all the alternative punk spaces had "Free Mumia" flyers and pamphlets about all sorts of issues on the table at shows. It was something we grew up with, and we ate it up. We were so wide-eyed and we wanted to know everything about the scene.

By the time we actually moved to the city after people went to college—2004-ish—it kind of died out in the Philly punk scene. Part of that I almost took as our responsibility to carry that forward, and we kind of let it down at the time, which is why it feels important to bring it back now. Better late than never.

The MOVE bombing happened a half-mile from where Joe lives now. It's so local, and you can still see exactly where the houses are that burnt down. They have a new row of shittily constructed condos that they put there, but it's still very visible. You can still feel it, nothing's changed. It's not too late to keep shining light on it. This isn't the first song that was written um about the MOVE bombing—Erik Peterson of Mischief Brew had a song about it—but it's not redundant, and it feels important to both be a Philadelphia band and to keep bringing it forward. Because nothing's changing, and nobody learned anything from that. There was no discipline taken at all, which is mind-blowing. We've gotten nowhere.

Tell me more about relationship with Philly in general.
Joe: Nick and myself grew up 45 minutes down the road. This is always where we'd come to experience music and art and just have fun. You're at that age where you're just starting to explore things yourself, so those memories of coming here are so deeply ingrained. It was always the place we all knew we'd end up at eventually. Talking to someone from New Jersey, they'll call New York "The city," and I'm like, "The city is Philadelphia." It always has been.

We'd go visit other cities and take little pieces of cool things we saw that were going on there. We all lived in a warehouse for a while, and we'd gotten some of that from Chicago and New York—seeing these like places where people built their own rooms, had little recording studios, and hung out and jammed all day. I'm really not seeing quite as much of that around here as there used to be.

Peter: I miss Philly—mostly for its people. I think Philadelphia is an awesome city. It's had an awesome history—incredible bands, cool places. Like Joe said, not that there's not cool places still popping up, but Philly loves getting rid of the cool shit in its history, too. But I miss the people of Philadelphia. There's a collective "fuck it" attitude that's somehow empowering. Everyone's looking around each other being like, "Yeah, it sucks, right? Fuck it—let's go get a beer."

There's a song on the album called "Koyaaniqatsi." Let's talk your guys' movie diet.
Peter: Last night I watched the Kathleen Hanna documentary, The Punk Singer. It was fucking great.

Joe: When we travel to the other side of the country to practice or jam or rehearse—whatever you want to call it—after the long day, we make a cocktail and put on a movie. Nick, our drummer, usually picks them. He picks them quickly, and it seems like he doesn't really think about it.

Peter: We watched Wild Hogs recently. We've watched Wild Hogs many times. Happy Gilmore 2?. Not bad.

Yeah, I thought it was really good too.
Peter: One of my favorites in recent times is Kinds of Kindness. It's so fucking weird, but in a perfect way.

I was looking through your guys' old Blogspot, which definitely took me back to a different time before a constant stream of people having to post 18 times on different social media formats. It seems quite elegant in comparison to what we have now! How do you guys feel about having about be digitally present now? Do you feel the urge to fire up the old Blogspot again?
Peter: I did like how that forced us to journal. If you're not keeping track of those things, you forget. It's interesting for me to read back over that stuff. I do feel like people today are not thrilled with the options that are given to them as far as keeping up on news and social media. There is a homogenous feel to it that doesn't feel very unique. I'm not opposed to it. It might be a little bit of extra work, but it's a good idea, Lawrence.